Social policy and everyday life in nursing homes: a critical ethnography

This is an ethnographic account of nursing homes in the United States. I draw connections between social policies and specific consequences for everyday life in this environment. This paper focuses on nursing assistants' wages, the economic impact of long term care on patients, the passification process of patient life, the invisibility of caring work, and the framing of everyday life into the concepts of capitalist industry. The primary data in the research are comments and conversations of nursing assistants and patients. Their standpoint, I conclude, is often opposed to the organizational logic of business that increasingly encases nursing home life.